ONE million homes narrowly escaped a power cut last month as bitterly cold weather placed a massive strain on Britain’s creaking electricity network.

Shutdown was only avoided because a gas-fired station due to close by next winter came to the rescue. Last night experts warned that life-threatening blackouts are increasingly likely as “we head downhill – fast”.

Alistair Buchanan, the outgoing head of energy regulator Ofgem said: “On Wednesday, January 16, due to unplanned outages and cold weather, National Grid had to find power to supply roughly a million homes to keep the lights on.

“Fawley, an oil-fired plant in Hampshire, was one of the power stations that responded. Next winter Fawley will not be there.”

And as a spell of bitter cold once more hits the UK, the near switch-off which came so perilously close on that freezing afternoon, underscores the magnitude of the energy crisis.

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Fawley is one of a number of coal and oil power stations being forced into retirement to comply with EU environmental targets.

The EU “large combustion plant directive”, aimed at cutting airborne pollution, will force ageing power stations to close by 2015. But they will be shut down before that if they use their allocated generating time earlier.

This comes at a time when almost all the country’s nuclear power stations are due to shut down because they have reached the end of their working lives.

But although the Government has made a commitment to building new nuclear stations there are no agreements in place to construct them and even the start of building work is some years away.

Jeremy Nicholson of the Energy Intensive Users Group, which represents big industry, warned: “There is a significant chance of physical shortages [of power] in peak conditions in the next two years.

“We are sailing close to the wind with an uncomfortably small margin of supply versus demand. This is not a trivial risk and not one the UK has faced before. We are concerned about the winter ahead and 2015.

“The first thing that will happen is higher prices for electricity.”

Winter weather, disruption to gas supplies, increasing reliance on wind power, which requires back up generation for days when there is no wind, all add to the risk of blackouts.

Ofgem estimates 10 per cent of the UK’s current generation stock will go off-line next month leaving the National Grid with an even tougher challenge.

Mr Buchanan warned that within three years the spare cushion of power generation would shrink from around 14 per cent to less than five per cent which is “uncomfortably tight”.

Freezing weather conditions could spell disaster if homes loose power

He said: “If you can imagine a ride on a rollercoaster at a fairground, then this winter we are at the top of the circuit and we head downhill – fast.”

The Government has had plenty of warning about the looming crisis, but there is little sign of construction.

Last year Energy Secretary Ed Davey told Parliament: “If we do not act now, we estimate that by the mid-2020s up to 2.5 million households will be affected by blackouts, costing the economy more than £100m a year.”

According to UK industry, investment totalling £110 billion is needed to keep pace with demand, three-quarters of this is required for new power generation while the rest is needed to improve transmission systems.

The Energy Bill before Parliament which is due to receive Royal Assent by the end of the year is designed to foster investment in renewable and nuclear power through guarantees backed by taxpayer subsidy.

However critics say it has failed to move with changing dynamics of the energy market which now favours gas following the discovery of huge amounts of shale gas in the US and extensive potential supplies in Britain.

But even building dozens of new gas plants to fill the generation gap looming in 2015 would mean even higher bills for families and businesses.

Ann Robinson, consumer champion at uSwitch, said: “We are facing disaster on energy prices. The dynamic has changed, but the thinking hasn’t.

“What worries me most is that the average household energy bill will be £1,400 by end of the year; £1,500 is a cliff edge at which most people say they’ll switch off the heating entirely.”